Water park plan floated in Cockenzie masterplan

A WATER park offering a range of outdoor pursuits including wakeboarding is being floated as a possible option for part of the former Cockenzie Power Station site.

The masterplan vision for the site, published by East Lothian Council last week, includes a suggestion that land to the west of the old coal handling plant could be turned into a “water activity park”.

The suggestion was one of dozens generated during workshops held by consultants compiling the masterplan; and in a report outlining their influences, it is revealed that Longniddry Primary School pupils first raised the idea.

They called for a wakeboarding park “like Foxlake” to be included in the masterplan.

The Cockenzie Forum – which brings together representatives of local community groups, interested parties and East Lothian Council – met to discuss the masterplan on Monday but no details of that meeting have been released.

Prestonpans Community Council, however, is expected to meet to discuss withdrawing its support for the masterplan and the local authority’s bid to buy the land from owners ScottishPower amid concerns at the direction the plan is taking.

Community councillors have raised concerns that the masterplan ignores Prestonpans, is more concerned about recreational facilities than creating jobs, and has no significant sources of funding.

The concept of the site, which stretches from the waterfront where the chimneys once stood to the B1361 road, at Meadowmill, includes landscape water features and a water park as a potential solution to utilising excess water coming from the former opencast coal mine land at nearby Blindwells.

The consultants’ report split the whole site into four zones for development.

Zone three, which takes in the former coal handling plant which was located south of the former power station, is described as having the potential to be a ‘power-house’ of development, featuring “a range of settings, from light industrial, through to office and HQ potential, as well as outdoors recreation and water-based pursuits, using the diverted excess surface water from north of the site, reused as a valuable asset and visual commodity”.

However, community councillor Calum Miller, who led a Prestonpans Community Council’s sub-committee which has focused on the site, criticised the costs of the overall proposals, which run to £500 million, and said there was no clear idea of where the money would come from.

And he accused the consultants of ignoring Prestonpans, which he pointed out, is barely mentioned in the introduction to the masterplan, and instead creating a plan for Cockenzie.

He said the failure to acknowledge Prestonpans in the masterplan meant it could claim there are “low levels of economic deprivation” in the area by dismissing the high concentration in the town itself.

He said: “This has shifted the report emphasis off jobs and onto recreational pursuits.”

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